1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of help systems and to providing self help for task or transaction oriented web based systems. More specifically, the invention relates to the use of a service oriented architecture based on metadata and web services to locate, categorize and provide relevant context sensitive help. The invention also relates to a system for providing an integrated information taxonomy which combines automatically, semi-automatically, and manually generated taxonomies and applies them to help systems.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Users of task or transaction oriented web sites are often reluctant to click on help links when performing web tasks because current web help content is often out of date, written poorly, or not relevant to the difficulty being encountered by the web user. General purpose help systems to support corporate intranets sometimes include relevant answers but are often the only help resource provided and require considerable effort on the part of the user to find the relevant answer. Hard coded help links providing specific context sensitive help written for the web page may answer the user's question but this is based on a guess by the help content author rather than actual successful experiences of users who found that this help content answered their specific question. Many Web sites provide long FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) lists which a user must read or search through to answer their question. The growth of online peer forums for support reflects the frustration of many users with support websites and helpdesks. Users seeking specific answers need to search through a long forum or to make an append and hope for a response. Text mining tools are available to categorize and summarize these FAQ lists and forum discussions but the analysis is not mapped to specific pages in a web based application so that the user can be presented with a very short list of help resources with a high likelihood of relevance. User rating systems have been used for recommending books and other services but have not been widely used to rate help content in a way that is useful to a user needing an answer in a hurry.
As an example of current practice, help for Microsoft Word is not integrated in a portal view. The desktop and web-based help resources are separate. User context is lost when moving from one section of the help information to another. Semantic and implicit user queries are not currently supported.
Currently, there are previously disclosed techniques which monitor and analyze user behavior with a task oriented web page or workstation application in order to provide user customized contextual help, regardless of whether the user has to explicitly submit a help query or contextual help is offered without explicit user request. Other previously disclosed techniques utilize a knowledge base to provide contextual help based on a combination of user behaviors and a typed query.
Furthermore, currently available stand-alone web based portals and associated search engines navigate information spaces to discover relevant information in response to queries, analyze and categorize the information and provide it to users.
XML and its related technologies enable specifying metadata and describing web services. Other markup languages, such as SGML, provide similar capabilities.
Currently, there are also a number of previously disclosed tools for taxonomy generation which focus on the automatic generation of taxonomy from unstructured information such as text.
While such systems address various aspects of providing context sensitive user help, it would be highly desirable to provide a comprehensive end-to-end system which combines these previously disclosed techniques into a system for intelligent web-based help which is accessed from a single web link, rather than requiring the user to access the output of the various previously disclosed techniques separately. Such a system would include information that was not available when the web site was developed and would offer users a choice of help information and some indication of its value from prior use as well as the opportunity for users to impact user ratings. Such a system would be designed using a service oriented architecture so that components could be added on demand and be provided or used by various stakeholders. Such a system would include an optional taxonomy generation system that would integrate different taxonomy generation tools and different data sources, provide a multi-dimensional taxonomy, and would be applicable to providing integrated user help.